also argue that the statute has also been overridden and rendered moot by later legislation that was enacted by Congress, the Act which admitted Texas into the Union as a state. The text of the subsequent Texas Admission Act, signed on 29 December 1845, states that Texas would be admitted to the Union "on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever," which moots any supposed special right for Texas to divide itself up into five states without the future approval of Congress in accordance to Article V, Section 3, of the US Constitution. Legislative efforts The division of the state of Texas was frequently proposed in the early decades of Texan statehood, particularly in the decades immediately prior to and following the American Civil War. Compromise of 1850 debates In the Compromise of 1850 debates, Tennessee Senator John Bell proposed division into two southern states, with the assent of Texas, in February 1850. New Mexico would get all Texas land north of the 34th parallel north, including today's Texas Panhandle, while the area to the south, including the southeastern part of today's New Mexico, would be divided at the Colorado River of Texas into two Southern states, balancing the admission of California and New Mexico as free states. State of Lincoln The State of Lincoln was proposed in 1869, to be carved out of the territory of Texas from the area south and west of the state's Colorado River. Unlike many other Texas division proposals of the Reconstruction period, this one was presented to Congress, but the state legislature did not take final action. State of Jefferson A bill was introduced in the Texas legislature in 1915 to create a State of Jefferson, made up of the Texas Panhandle. Texlahoma In 1935, in response to what proponents felt was lack of state attention to road infrastructure, A. P. Sights proposed that 46 northern Texas counties and 23 western Oklahoma counties secede to form a new, roughly rectangular state called Texlahoma. Considerations In 2009, Nate Silver wrote an article covering the topic of dividing Texas. He argued that a division could slightly help Republicans in the Senate while slightly hurting them in the Electoral College, ultimately concluding that there was not much rationale for either political party to support such a division. In a 2019 Yale lecture series called "Power and Politics in Today's World", Professor Ian